Alabama Power

Alabama Power Company, headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, provides electricity service to 1.4 million homes, businesses, and industries in the southern two-thirds of Alabama. It is one of four U.S. public utilities operated by the Southern Company, one of the nation's largest generators of electricity.

Alabama Power is an investor-owned, tax-paying utility, and the second largest subsidiary of Southern Company. More than 78,000 miles of power lines carry electricity to customers throughout 44,500 square miles.

Alabama Power's hydroelectric generating plants encompass several lakes on the Tallapoosa River, Coosa River, and Black Warrior Rivers, as well as coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and cogeneration plants in various parts of the state. In addition to generating electricity, the waters surrounding the plants offer recreational opportunities for Alabama residents and visitors.

Environmental Litigation
In 1999 the United States Environmental Protection Agency commenced an enforcement action against Alabama Power under the Clean Air Act. In 2006, the EPA announced that Alabama Power had agreed to spend more than $200m to upgrade pollution controls as a partial settlement of this action.

The settlement did not include claims regarding five coal fired plants. Those claims proceeded to trial, and Alabama Power prevailed.

However, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) has appealed the ruling. SELC was involved in a case against Duke Energy that was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States in 2006, in which the Supreme Court upheld a Clean Air Act program, New Source Review, designed to clean up the nation’s oldest coal-fired power plants. Under New Source Review, a utility must install modern pollution controls whenever modifications are made that result in an increase in emissions, and the Supreme Court held that emissions should be measured on an annual rather than hourly basis, to get a more accurate measurement of when pollution controls should be required. The ruling could force Alabama Power and other utilities to upgrade pollution controls of old coal-fired power plants.

March 2011: Judge dismisses remaining upgrade requirements
On March 14, 2011, U.S. District Judge Virginia Hopkins ruled that "routine maintenance" of coal fired power plants do not require the company to get new clean air permits from the federal government. The Environmental Protection Agency had determined that maintenance projects altered plant operations to the point where new permits were required under the New Source Review provisions of the federal Clean Air Act. The decade old case dates to eight projects performed at four coal fired plants in Alabama in the mid-eighties to mid-nineties. Five of the claims were dropped by the EPA in 2010. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Virginia Hopkins dismissed the three remaining claims.

Alabama Power receives receives federal grant for carbon capture and storage at Barry plant
In December 2009, Southern Company received a $295 million grant from the Department of Energy to retrofit 160MW at the Barry Steam Plant for carbon capture. The company plants to compress and transport the CO2 through a pipeline and store up to one million metric tons per year in deep saline formations. The company will also explore using the captured CO2 for enhanced oil recovery.

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 * Southern Company
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 * Alabama and coal
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 * Mississippi and coal
 * United States and coal
 * Global warming

External Articles
http://www.encyclopediaofalabama.org/face/Article.jsp?id=h-1524, history of Alabama Power Company